Backwards Compatibility

1st Official Post

    I'm sure this is a topic brought up before, so I'm hesitant to ask, but how about some backwards compatibility? As in, mods that utilize the IC 1.95 infrastructure can still be used in 1.97. I'm not sure how much time or effort it would take to do that, but it seems like every time IC2 is updated addon authors have to update their stuff or it's completely unusable without using the old version. Am I wrong? It seems like it might be a worthwhile (not necessarily easy) thing to have both past and current program infrastructure rolled into the same version, and let addons choose which set to run from on a case-by case basis. I'm not saying it's easy, but would it be worth it? Perhaps, to lessen the time spent on such a thing, backwards compatibility could be relegated to every .1 versions, so 1.9 addons are compatible with 1.8, and 2.0 addons will be compatible with 1.9? Maybe you can put compatibility-altering changes all in those versions, I don't know, but it's a thought.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Dalsio

    I'm sure this is a topic brought up before, so I'm hesitant to ask, but how about some backwards compatibility? As in, mods that utilize the IC 1.95 infrastructure can still be used in 1.97. I'm not sure how much time or effort it would take to do that, but it seems like every time IC2 is updated addon authors have to update their stuff or it's completely unusable without using the old version. Am I wrong? It seems like it might be a worthwhile (not necessarily easy) thing to have both past and current program infrastructure rolled into the same version, and let addons choose which set to run from on a case-by case basis. I'm not saying it's easy, but would it be worth it? Perhaps, to lessen the time spent on such a thing, backwards compatibility could be relegated to every .1 versions, so 1.9 addons are compatible with 1.8, and 2.0 addons will be compatible with 1.9? Maybe you can put compatibility-altering changes all in those versions, I don't know, but it's a thought.

    Its only, because of the Addon-Authors not or barely using the IC²-API (because the API has not all what they need). Most Addons are directly coded with the decompiled IC²-Sourcecode, what makes them depedant on it and causes incompatiblity with older Versions.

    Probably not going to happen. Whenever Minecraft changes version, the obfuscation changes too. Which means that any mod that even looks at a Minecraft base class will need to be recompiled and reobfuscated.


    IC2 version changes tend to happen when Minecraft version changes happen, therefore mods will not work unless recompiled against the new Minecraft.

    GENERATION (Pineapple + i): The first pineapple you see, copy it into your sig on any forum and add sqrt(-1) to the generation. Pineapple experiment.

    Yes, but would it be possible to include both the previous version of the sourcecode and the new version in such a way that mods can use either version of the sourcecode, and their interactivity with the game runs through the different version of IC? Essentially, it would be two mods, each a different version, rolled into one. The new version would be designated a completely separate mod from the old version and both are updated like a hand-me down with one mod always being a version behind the other. The two would combine all items, blocks, etc. for the player so they don't see any difference, but in reality the stuff they see comes from two different sets of the same data. The advantage of this, is that addons can use either sourcecode to become dependent on, so that they don't have to necessarily update in order for the addon to work with the new version, but they won't be able to take advantage of the new version's improved sourcecode without updating it, and if they still don't update it a second version in a row, the mod would become unusable like normal.


    In the end, I haven't seen the IC2 code, so I wouldn't know how it would be done, but the idea is there.